Junot Díaz, Feminism and Ethnicity

One of the letter’s signatories, Linda Martín Alcoff’, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, followed up with an op-ed in The New York Times distinguishing between repentant and unrepentant misogynists, and situating individual perpetrators within larger political systems. “Clearly, we need to go beyond easy binaries,” Alcoff wrote. “The letter I signed calls on all of us to think through the important issue of how to demand individual responsibility from abusers while also being vigilant about our collective and institutional responsibility, to develop critiques of the conventions of sexual behavior that produce systemic sexual abuse. While individuals can never be absolved of responsibility by blaming structural conditions, those conditions do create opportunities, excuses, even training in the ways of domination, and these have to be radically transformed.”